Leysi Palacio-Mora, 39, opens the back door of her Ypsilanti child care center.
She’s walking through what would happen if agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement came to the site: kids go to the back with staff while Palacio-Mora goes out the front to try to confirm the ICE agent’s identity and ask for a warrant. In case of an emergency, kids evacuate out the back to a nearby business.
“Imagine wrangling 20 babies out the back to get safe,” she said.
Palacio-Mora is one of several child care providers in Ypsilanti, a city with a significant foreign-born population, who say they’re trying to figure out how to best protect kids and families and address parent fears as reports of ICE enforcement increase locally.
While a local spokesman for ICE said they do not target schools or bus stops for enforcement actions aimed at arresting unauthorized immigrants, there are reports of parents being detained shortly after student drop off or pick-ups in Michigan. Despite reassurances from federal officials, many are worried and are preparing.
Concern in Ypsilanti reached a fever pitch late last month when rumors spread − including through a Facebook post from the county sheriff − that ICE had targeted parents at a bus stop. Another rumor circulated that ICE was at a child care facility in the city.
Attorneys for at least three of the four individuals detained that day, who ICE said were in the country illegally, have since confirmed the agents did not target the bus stop. And the child care facility owner said ICE was not at the center.
These two Ypsilanti incidents are a window into the wider concern growing across Michigan over ICE activity in the wake of violent escalations that have captured national attention, most prominently in Minneapolis where two U.S. citizens, Renee Nicole Good, 37, and Alex Pretti, 37, were shot and killed by ICE officers.
Last week, a post in a Royal Oak Reddit page titled “ICE Came to my Door Today” spread online across multiple different Michigan Reddit threads, though the Royal Oak Police Department told the Free Press they haven’t received any official reports of ICE in the city.
On Monday, Feb. 2, several Facebook posts showed ICE at an Amazon facility in Hazel Park arresting an employee, which Free Press reporting substantiated. ICE said the employee had previously crossed into to the U.S. illegally.
And the Livonia Police Department responded to growing worry recently on Facebook, to dispel rumors swirling that the office was actively working with ICE and Customs and Border Patrol to enforce immigration laws. In the statement, the department said they have not worked with ICE or CBP to enforce immigration law and doesn’t have an agreement with them to do so.
What’s clear is that community fear over ICE enforcement is real. And in an era where previously guaranteed protections against immigration enforcement in sensitive places – like child cares, schools and places of worship – have been rolled back, no one feels immune, child care providers in Ypsilanti say – not a parent picking up their kid from preschool, nor the kid themself.
Nationally there have been documented instances of ICE either directly targeting a school or child care center, or detaining students, parents or staff in the vicinity of these spaces, like school parking lots and bus stops, in Minnesota, Illinois, and California since January 2025.
Part of the fabric of local families’ daily lives, providers have a front row seat to the anxiety over how ICE enforcement could impact kids. Charged with protecting society’s most vulnerable members, they’re also feeling that fear themselves.
Parents deported
The concern is founded and urgent, some Ypsilanti child care providers say.
Over the last year, Palacio-Mora said she’s witnessed a growing ICE presence around her center. Eden Bilingual Childcare Center is located in Arbor Plaza, across from a trailer park where many immigrants live, so the community is on high alert. Word spreads when certain unmarked vehicles are seen consistently circling or parked in the area. In 2025, two parents enrolled in her program were detained by ICE – one at their home in the trailer park and another at an immigration appointment – and eventually both families left the country.
“I didn’t expect it to get this bad,” said Palacio-Mora. “Some people were gonna be deported, I understand. But I didn’t think it was gonna get to the point where I’m looking at the parking lot, making sure there’s no ICE because I have a family leaving with two kids and I know their background is what it is.”
Looking out of the large window of her toddler classroom, Palacio-Mora can see the parking lot her center shares with a laundromat, a convenience store and a closed Mexican restaurant.
She said she’s consistently seen two unmarked vehicles circling, or parked in the shared parking lot or across the street at Sam’s Club – one Jeep Grand Cherokee and one pickup truck – that the community believes to be ICE agents. The center’s lawyer has given Palacio-Mora background on how to identify ICE agents through signifiers like how they’re dressed, she said.
“It’s just anxiety and paranoia,” she said. “We have to be on watch a lot more than usual.”
President Donald Trump has promised the biggest mass deportation program in U.S. history and described increased ICE enforcement as necessary to achieving his administration’s goal. The Trump administration has said the purpose of its deportation campaign is to “remove the criminals from our country“.
According to data ICE staff leaked to libertarian think tank Cato Institute, only 5% of the people ICE took into custody between October and November 2025 had a violent criminal conviction, 5% had an immigration conviction, 6% had a traffic conviction, and 73% had no convictions.
In response to Free Press questions about growing fears surrounding their enforcement actions, a local ICE spokesperson reiterated that the agency does not target schools or bus stop locations, and that those detained in Ypsilanti “remain in ICE custody pending immigration proceedings and will receive due process.”
The spokesperson reiterated their concern that rumors like the one about ICE targeting a bus stop in Ypsilanti put ICE officers at greater risk for attacks and death threats, and encouraged those not legally authorized to be in the U.S. to self-deport in order to “reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way to live the American dream.”
In response to questions nationally about ICE enforcement in places like child cares, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin has defended ICE activity across the board, insisting ICE’s objective is to arrest violent criminals. The administration has painted increasing deployment of ICE officers in cities like Minneapolis and escalating enforcement as being in the interest of public safety, though Trump himself has recently called for a “softer touch” in immigration enforcement in response to public outcry over the ICE killings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
Planning for the worst
Palacio-Mora sent out a protocol sheet to parents last week, following Tuesday’s detainment of four Ypsilanti community members.
“As we may have all heard, protected places that ICE were unable to go to such as schools/churches have been removed as of January 20th, 2025. If for any reason ICE comes to the center there are specific steps that will take place for the protection of all our children in care as well as staff,” reads Eden Bilingual Childcare Center’s ICE protocol, which goes on to specify things like asking ICE to produce a warrant and contacting parents in the case ICE agents have a court order or subpoena for a child’s records.
For Kim Tiemann, director at the Ypsilanti location of Gretchen’s House Child Development Centers, preparing for potential contact with ICE at the center is “now of urgent concern,” she said.
“We’re feeling an increase in their presence right around our area and in Ypsi,” Tiemann said, citing the incident earlier that week when ICE detained parents in Ypsilanti.
At a recent in-person weekly meeting with the directors of Gretchen’s House’s 12 other locations across Ann Arbor, the conversation shifted to focus on this topic. Though the centers already had a general plan for responding to ICE, developing a step-by-step protocol in case ICE comes to a center now took on an unprecedented urgency. The group hammered out details on things like identifying a chain of command for communication with ICE agents, talking through different possible scenarios and sorting through an understanding of judicial warrants and regulations.
They’re also considering offering transportation for families in their program who don’t feel safe going outside, to take kids from their homes to Gretchen’s House centers, to ensure they “can make it to school safely and consistently,” Tiemann wrote in an email.
Tiemann said Gretchen’s House centers are also in conversation and sharing resources with other child care centers in the area as they create their own plans.
Dorothy Morris, owner of two child care sites known as Dorothy’s Discovery Daycare in Ypsilanti, said she’s leaned on other providers as well as Washtenaw Intermediate School District for information and support as she looks to develop her center’s ICE protocols.
“It’s really not somewhere we’d ever thought we’d be,” Tiemann said of those who work in child care and early education.
“That I would have to stand in front of and protect kids and families we serve from a group of people who should be supporting us in protecting these kids and their families.”
Tears and questions
Child care centers are already secure places, said Palacio-Mora. Licensing requires certain safety measures, like emergency evacuation plans, be in place to keep kids safe. Tinted windows and locked doors ensure privacy and security, and anyone not familiar entering a center is ID’ed.
But providers say they want to be proactive, and that’s in part prompted by worried parents.
“I had a few parents come to the door at drop off crying, concerned about our protocol and what’s gonna happen if [ICE] comes to the door,” said Palacio-Mora.
Rachel Fisher, 38, is one of the concerned parents at Eden Bilingual who said she’s become increasingly worried over the last year as immigration enforcement has felt more local.
“I’ve been paying attention to who seems to be in the parking lot when we pick up and drop off,” she said.
Fisher said her biggest concern as a parent is that ICE agents seem increasingly unrestrained, pointing both to what she’s seen on the news happen in places like Minneapolis and the detainment of parents locally. She said it felt unnecessary and contrary to the purpose of law enforcement.
“Basically ICE agents are now essentially given guns and told they don’t have to follow the law and can do whatever,” she said.
Fisher said she’s also concerned about the emotional trauma kids face when parents are taken away in front of them. She said she’s offered to do pick up and drop off for kids at Eden Bilingual whose parents don’t feel safe leaving the home. Fisher worries her 4-year-old son’s center could be a target because it has “bilingual” in the name.
Danielle DeSano-Smith, owner of It’s A Small World child care in Ypsilanti, said she’s recently seen more messages exchanged in group chats and conversations with parents alerting of suspected ICE presence outside this or that early learning program.
Last Thursday, parents at Adventure Center, an Ypsilanti-based child care center, were alerted that a rumor about ICE agents at the site wasn’t true. Adventure Center owner Patty Sherwood said she thinks the rumor likely got started as many rumors do — a game of telephone on Facebook or Reddit amongst parents gone haywire, leading to misunderstanding and panic.
Sherwood herself is not urgently concerned about ICE impacting her center and wanted parents to know her site already has strict security protocols in place for any emergency and wouldn’t let an ICE agent in without a judicial warrant.
“We really want to reassure them that their children are safe, not just physically but safe also from trauma,” she said.
Morris said she thinks the widespread fear among parents stems from Ypsilanti’s diversity and the fact that kids from all different backgrounds share a classroom in a place like child care. Around 10% of Ypsilanti’s population is foreign born according to Census data, above than the state average of 7%.
“Whether or not you feel it’s you they’re looking for, if your child is there, that’s a really scary thought,” she said.
Impact on kids
While the ICE incident in Ypsilanti didn’t target a bus stop, Michigan Immigrant Rights Center spokesperson Christine Sauvé said community concern over ICE activity impacting kids is warranted given that ICE enforcement patterns indicate they target people coming and going from their home, which commonly includes “sensitive activities or locations,” she said, “like picking up or dropping off children.”
Sauvé confirmed the ICE raid “did not take place as a result of targeting a school bus stop,” though she said the incident resulted “in the cruel, needless separation of parents from their children.” Michigan Immigrant Rights Center attorneys are representing at least three of those detained in Ypsilanti.
There are also a number of concerning examples of ICE incidents in other states where kids have been either targeted directly or indirectly impacted by ICE enforcement, Sauvé said.
In November 2025, Diana Santilla Galeano was arrested at Rayito de Sol, the Spanish immersion child care center in Chicago where she taught, while kids were present (Galeano has since been released) and in Minneapolis, ICE officers removed a teacher from her car outside Jardin Spanish Immersion Academy, where she’d just arrived for work.
In two other recent cases, a child was detained by ICE in Minnesota, separated from their family, and transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement in Michigan, and a father was taken from his car at a gas station in Ann Arbor, his 9-year-old daughter was “peeled off of him,” and he was tased, pushed to the ground and handcuffed as his daughter looked on, Sauvé said.
Beki San Martin is a fellow at the Detroit Free Press who covers child care, early childhood education and other issues that affect the lives of children ages 5 and under and their families in metro Detroit and across Michigan. Contact her at rsanmartin@freepress.com.
This fellowship is supported by the Bainum Family Foundation. The Free Press retains editorial control of this work.